Watch This, Not That: This is 40/Two for the Road

In this series, I will take a look at a film releasing in theatres this week and recommend an older/classic film either as a double feature companion (if the new release looks to be worth watching) or a substitute (if it looks like the new release is of the skippable variety). If it’s a double feature suggestion, it’ll be titled “Watch This, THEN That” instead, of course, but they’ll all be under the same category for easy navigation. I’ve had this idea percolating in my head for a while, as a way to highlight and talk about both new and older films, since I enjoy both. As far as which new release I pick any given week, that’s up to my whims and which one lends itself best to double-featuring/replacing. Obviously, if you’re interested in a new release I’ve replaced, feel free to treat it as a double-feature suggestion instead.

New Release: Judd Apatow’s This is 40

I’ll admit upfront that I’m not a big Judd Apatow fan, whether he’s directing or only producing. I did enjoy Freaks and Geeks, but I disliked Knocked Up, Anchorman, and Talladega Nights, thought Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall were just okay, and haven’t seen anything from him since then. I was considering checking out This is 40, though, simply because the one part of Knocked Up I did like was the Paul Rudd/Leslie Mann subplot, about a mismatched couple on the brink of marital disaster as they approach middle age. It had a melancholy, a resonance, and a realistic tint to it that I found utterly lacking in the main plot, and I was curious to see if that translate over to a full-length film focused on these characters.

Now, granted, I haven’t seen it, but I’ve kept a close eye on the reactions from other bloggers I trust, and it hasn’t really been encouraging. It seems the same problems I had with Knocked Up (a shrill and mean-spirited undertone in a story that goes for easy, juvenile laughs more often than real emotions) surface here, just as they seem to in the trailer.

So instead, I’ll recommend an older film about a disintegrating marriage, 1967’s Two for the Road.

Watch This Instead: Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road

Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn play a long-married couple who have gotten to the point where silence and bickering are their two main modes of communication. As they drive to a party to which neither of them really wants to go, they think back about the entirety of their marriage, considering whether it’s worth it to try to keep going or just break it off. These reminiscences are treated as flashbacks, with the conceit that all of the memories take place as the couple is on a trip somewhere (on “the road,” as in the title), and rather than being signaled normal flashback techniques, the transitions are accomplished by a car passing, which turns out to be their car in another era, on another trip. It may sound gimmicky, but it works beautifully, because it basically collapses time in on itself.

You see, every one of these memories, whether it’s the early joy they took in each other’s company as they were falling in love, or the awkward trips taken in tandem with other couples (one time with one of his ex-girlfriends), or the recent, much more trying trips where fighting and standoffishness had become the order of the day, is in some way “the present,” because they’re all still part of who Finney and Hepburn are as individuals and as a couple. That happy young couple is still part of them, as is the resentful middle-aged couple, and the couple that defines themselves against who they might’ve become with other people. It’s a fascinating concept that I haven’t seen used very much, but really gets at the heart of why marriage breakup stories are so heartbreaking – this is a couple that once delighted in each other and now does not. What happened?

The answers aren’t easy, nor simple, just as they never are in real life. The film focuses almost solely on Finney and Hepburn and depends on their ability to convey different ages and relationship stages through dialogue and subtle facial expressions, and they are more than up to the task. This is one of the most adult films I’ve ever seen, and I mean that in the best way possible – a film that treats not only its characters as adults but its audience as well, and gets at the raw emotional truths that underlie any story that purports to depict or explain the dissolution of a marriage. And yet it never feels dry or hard to watch, but is consistently entertaining and enjoyable, even as you ache for the couple in it.

Freaks and Geeks doesn’t hardly seem like it was made by the same guy as all of Apatow’s films – despite having Jason Segal in the cast. It’s quite good. And yeah, I can’t get the love for Knocked Up at all. I actually disliked it, and I don’t truly dislike very many things.

Two for the Road, on the other hand, is an amazing movie. Blew me away the first time I saw it.

Many of my classic film blogger buddies are already at TCM Film Fest RIGHT NOW – I won’t be able to get there until Friday night, but in the meantime, here’s my preview post at Flickchart that runs down some of the films easily available to watch at home if you’re not able to go to the fest, and some films that aren’t easily available at all to whet your interest in making it to the fest next year. Hope to see you this year or a future one!

I need to do better about cross-referencing the stuff I write elsewhere in this little “elsewhere” column. That’s what it’s here for! I’m continuing to write TCM programming guides every month at the Flickchart blog (April’s will be…soon…I’m behind), and managing the Decades series, where we look back at films celebrating decade anniversaries this year.

For April, we looked back 90 years to 1927, a watershed year in the history of cinema with the exploding popularity of sound films, but also possibly the height of silent film artistry. All of the films featured in the post are silent (The Jazz Singer did not make Flickchart’s Global Top Ten), and it’s an embarrassment of riches. Check it out!

Video essayist Kogonada tends to let images and editing speak for themselves, and that’s precisely what he does here (with a slight bit of added Godard-esque typography, mostly to translate French audio), juxtaposing shots from various 1960-1967 Godard films to highlight recurring techniques. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who watches Godard’s early work that he had some specific things on his mind, but seeing it put together like this with excellent music and editing choices is mesmerizing and wonderful.

Chuck Jones is by far my favorite animation director of all time, and Tony Zhou is currently my favorite video essayist. Put them together? Yep, this is nine must-see minutes right here. And I’m also reminded that I need to get back to my Looney Tunes series that I started months ago and seemingly abandoned – but I didn’t, I promise! It’s just delayed.

“There’s an old story, borne out by production records, about [producer] Arthur Hornblow Jr. deciding to exert his power by handing [Billy] Wilder and [Charles] Brackett’s fully polished draft [of the screenplay for 1939’s Midnight] to a staff writer named Ken Englund. (Like many producers, then and now, Hornblow just wanted to put some more thumbprints on it.) Englund asked Hornblow what he was supposed to do with the script, since it looked good enough to him. “Rewrite it,” said Hornblow. Englund did as he was told and returned to Hornblow’s office with a new draft whereupon the producer told him precisely what the trouble was: it didn’t sound like Brackett and Wilder anymore. “You’ve lost the flavor of the original!” Hornblow declared. Englund then pointed out that Brackett and Wilder themselves were currently in their office doing nothing, so Hornblow turned the script back to them for further work. Charlie and Billy spent a few days playing cribbage and then handed in their original manuscript, retyped and doctored with a few minor changes. Hornblow loved it, and the film went into production.”

“For the refugees, a harsh accent was the least of their troubles. The precise cases, endless portmanteaus, and complex syntactical structure of the German language made their transition to English a strain. It required a thorough rearrangement of thought. In German, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence; in English, it appears everywhere but. In German, conversation as well as written discourse, like a well-ordered stream through a series of civilized farms, flows. In English, such constructions are stilted. We like to get to the point and get there fast. For a displaced screenwriter – an adaptable one, anyway – American English lend itself to the kind of direct, immediate, constantly unfolding expressivity that German tended to thwart. Linguistically at least, American emotions are more straightforward. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin puts it this way: ‘When you start a sentence in German, you have to know at the beginning what the end will be. In English, you live the sentence through to the end. Emotion and thought go together. In German, they’re divorced. Everything is abstract.’

For a flexible storyteller like Billie Wilder – or Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov, for that matter – the new mix of languages was wondrous, pregnant with sounds and bursting with meaning. Wilder’s ear picked up our slang as well as our pragmatic syntax, and his inventive, hard-edged mind found twentieth-century poetry in them. Puns, jokes, verbal color, even the modern-sounding American tones and resonances one could make in the mouth – all were deeply engaging to the young writer-ranconteur. It was exciting for him to get laughs in a new language.”